Wednesday, 7 November 2012

A Cape Adventure #4 - Welt Pockets

Hello my lovely readers and welcome to the next step on my cape making adventure: Welt Pockets!

Now you may remember that the original pattern was only supposed to have faux pockets which meant only the welt pattern piece was included. In order to create useable pockets I had to draft my own pieces for the pocket underlay and the pocket bag.

Once this drafting was done I was ready to cut out my fabric (the welt and the underlay in the plaid wool and the pocket bag in a cotton sateen I am using for the lining) and start the construction of my welt pockets!

The construction of a welt pocket is very similar to the construction of a bound buttonhole, insofar as you sew a lot of fiddly pieces on the right side of your fabric before cutting into your fabric and passing all these fiddly pieces to the wrong side to create your neat little pocket!Well, that's how I see it, but if you want it explained properly then take a look at this how to from the Coletterie, it's great and will tell you all you need to know about welt pockets!

I've taken a few shots of my own construction of my welt pockets to show you the process a bit more broken down...

First up I marked the placement of my pockets on the right side of my front pieces. Some people prefer to mark with fabric markers or chalk but I find that pins work fine.

To make sure that my pockets are exactly level I made sure that the pins were mirroring each other in their plaid placement. This is one of those moments where working with plaid is actually a help rather than a hinderance! After marking these points I reenforced these areas with weft interfacing (on the wrong side of the fabric) as they about to get a lot of wear and tear!

Next up you need to construct the separate parts of the pocket. The welt pieces are sewn together along both short edges and one long edge, the seams trimmed and graded and then the welt turned right side out and pressed. The pocket underlay is sewn to the upper pocket piece, and both the welt and the upper pocket need a row of stitching 1/4 inch away from the raw edge for the welt and the top edge for the upper pocket (this row can be seen in the second picture below)

The welt, pinned and ready to be stitched, trimmed, graded, turned and pressed!

The welt and upper pocket, stitched to the front of the cape

This 1/4 row of stitching is the one you will sew over to attach these pieces of the pocket to the cape front. The welt pocket stitching line is sewn completely but the upper pocket is sewn about 1/8 inch short of the welt line on each end, so that the pocket bag will fit neatly inside the welt and will not be seen. After this stitching is done, very much like a bound buttonhole, you make an incision (my goodness, it sounds like surgery doesn't it?!) on your pocket line (in my case the line between my two pins) and then flip the upper pocket and the welt to the inside. I cannot stress how much you should go and check out the Coletterie tutorial if this isn't making any sense, their directions are very clear and I am aware that I'm rambling quite a bit! Plus I really didn't take as many pictures as I should have done!

In the below picture you can see that the upper pocket and underlay have been turned to the inside and my welt is still lying flat.

It was at this point that my camera didn't want to play ball anymore so I went on and completed my welt pockets without taking any more photos. To be honest, once you have passed this point the scary bit is over and the final steps are quite simple. Once again I direct you to the Coletterie tutorial where they will show you how to attach your lower pocket to the raw edge of the welt, stitch down the little triangles you made during the cutting of the window to the pocket underlay, sew the upper and lower pocket bag pieces together and finally fell stitch the edges of the welt pocket down to the cape front to finish. Believe me, it's all a lot less complicated than it sounds!

Anyways, here are my completed welt pockets:

It's all looking pretty good isn't it? At this point, as well as completing the welt pockets, I have attached my upper collar to the pad stitched lower collar, - the upper collar was interfaced with some weft so that it would match the weight of the lower collar - trimmed and graded the seams, turned it out and pressed it and under-stitched the collar by hand so that the seam favours to the underside of the collar. I have also sewn the front cape pieces to the back piece and have attached the under collar to the cape. It's definitely starting to look like more cape-ish isn't it?

Anyway, I think that's quite enough waffling from me for one day, but I'll be back soon with more updates on this Cape Adventure, it won't be long now until it's big reveal!

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About Me

Welcome to the world of "The Little Red Squirrel"! A year ago I gave up buying new clothes in favour of making my own or buying second hand. Join me as I continue in my adventures to build a handmade, home-sewn, vintage life.